Now presenting Manga Shakespearethe Bard’s greatest plays in an accessible, lively format for a new generation of readers

Romeo and Juliet is ideally suited for the manga formatit has teenage heroes, scheming and villainous adults, heartbreaking tragedy, and the ultimate romantic plot about star-cross’d lovers. Romeo, a Montague, and Juliet, a Capulet, fall deeply in loveand they refuse to let their parents’ age-old feud get in their way. When Romeo is banished from their town, a series of mistakes and misunderstandings, along with their families’ mutual hatred, finally manages to end their love. An exciting introduction to the Bard for reluctant readers and manga fans alike. – Goodreads

If you’re a mega bookworm, if books are your life and soul, if you eat books for breakfast then you’re going to love English Literature. Well, it depends. You also need to be okay with reading books you hate, you need to be patient to get through modules on time periods you couldn’t care less about, and you need to understand Lit is less about reading for enjoyment and more about being able to quickly read craploads of material, process it, and analyse the daylights out of it.

I’ve had some questions from college students regarding English degrees and I thought it would be nice to put all the information in one big post to clear up some confusion. But since I studied both English Language and Literature, it’s difficult to be as informative as possible without making this post over 5,000 words long. So, I’m going to break things down and have a post focusing on just English Language, a separate one on just English Literature and then maybe one on the pros and cons to a joint honours degree in English Language and English Literature. The aim of these posts is to help potential students decide which English course sounds right for them, and to give them a little advice to help them feel more prepared for university.

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan.

So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity. – Goodreads.

My first thought while writing the title for this post was: am I really explaining this? I mean, I thought everyone would know that reading a quote does not equal reading the book. But I have another reason for being annoyed by people thinking along these lines and using, “I saw the quotes directly from the text” as justification. I did get a few replies on Twitter from people who said they hadn’t thought about things this way once I ranted about why it upset me. But I’m STILL seeing people do this without realising how messed up it is. So, I decided to write a post on it.

First of all, I’m not supporting problematic content, nor is this an attack on anyone sharing such information with the book community (if it comes across that way, I apologise, not my intention at all). This is a post about exactly what the title says. My issue is with people using lines like: “I read a quote about this book in a review and that’s my evidence that the whole book is terrible.” I’ve literally seen people justify calling an entire book racist/sexist/ableist/homophobic based on quotes in a review, they think those quotes are proof enough. I don’t think the people doing this understand that using secondary quotes to label a book in this way is problematic in itself.